Thanksgiving

We spent Thanksgiving day with Jay's family in Dallas, where unfortunately I didn't get many pictures. I did get this one of Jay and his cousin, Casey.

Casey has three kids and Andrew loved his oldest, Katherine. He kept calling her "hey girl" and followed her everywhere! On Friday we headed to Tyler to see my family. Andrew and Alyson had a blast playing together!! I'm so glad that he's starting to enjoy his cousins!

The picture below is my cousin's little girl...isn't she a cutie!
We really had a great time seeing family and now we're getting ready to head back to school tomorrow. Getting to sleep late this past week has been wonderful, but Andrew is ready to get back into his routine. He's asked for Ms. Becky (his teacher) every day this week! On that note, he's doing really well in school. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago where they confirmed that Andrew is autistic...moderate is what they labeled him. They said that academically he's doing great. They also said that he's got great receptive language and a really good vocabulary. They said that he does really well one on one, but when they try to do group activities, he gets distracted. They feel that by the fall he will be in a mainstream pre-k classroom! This was really great news! Please continue to pray for us. We are really thrilled with Andrew's progress, but we want to know that we are doing everything possible to help him recover from this. He will always be autistic, but seeing how far he's come in so little time gives us hope that he can lead a "normal" life.

Visit to ER....

And I'm not referring to the set of the popular medical drama. Today Andrew had his first visit to the emergency room. He started coughing yesterday and then woke up this morning having trouble breathing. So we gave him a breathing treatment. It helped some, but by lunch time he had also developed a fever. So we decided to put him down for his nap and see how he was when he woke up. Well, he couldn't even get to sleep he was coughing so much, so I went in his room to check on him and I heard the wheezing as soon as I opened his door. He was really struggling. So we decided to take him to the clinic that's open on Saturdays. As soon as we got back in to the room the nurse said, "wow, he's really struggling, I think I'm going to go ahead and get the dr." The dr. came in and listened to him and said that he really thought we should take him to the ER. He said his chest was really tight and he really thought he should have an x-ray. So, off we go to the ER. I'm really worrying by this point because I didn't think autistic children and hospitals meshed very well. I just knew he was not going to cooperate with them, especially since he was going to have to have an x-ray!!! Well, Andrew amazed us. He did soooo great through everything. They gave him three breathing treatments and decided that he has bronchitis. We've always had to hold him down for breathing treatments, but by the second one he just sat there like a little angel and we even gave him one tonight before bed and he just laid back and relaxed during it!!! Here are some pictures of our visit:

This is after the second breathing treatment, I think. He was already feeling better. Oh and did I mention that we were supposed to be having our sunday school class over for appetizers for our progressive dinner tonight? Thankfully our pastor's wife is a saint! She came over and fixed all of the stuff I had already bought and everyone just came over as planned. When we got home we couldn't even tell anyone had been here!! So anyway, hopefully Andrew will be feeling all better soon. He's on cough medicine, steroids and an antibiotic so I'm sure he will!

Happy 30th Jay!!!

I think it was a pretty good farewell to the 20's. We started the celebration yesterday by heading to Dallas after lunch. We dropped Andrew off at Nana's and then headed off to:
It was wonderful!!! From there, we headed to the Dallas Stars Game. If you know my husband, this was the perfect birthday present. Someone gave Jay their season tickets for that night and we sat 8 rows off the ice! It was sooooo cool to be that close. Unforunately the Stars played horribly and lost 5-0! But we did get to see Wayne Gretzky so that made it a little more bearable. Oh and we saw a fight with blood and everything....you get to see a really disturbing side to people at hockey games when the players start to fight. They start taunting and cheering the players on to beat the brains out of the other one....like I said, disturbing.

Then today we spent with Jay's family. His dad drove down from Oklahoma and we ate way too much and just enjoyed laying around together. Among other things, Jay got a Blackberry from his family and it's pretty cool even to a technological idiot like myself. Overall, I think it was a pretty great birthday.